Research paper

                For High School students

               

What is the purpose of writing? Well that depends a lot on what you are writing and why. It isn’t hard to imagine that when J.K. Rowling was writing Harry Potter she had a much different mindset and goal than when Benjamin Franklin was writing the Poor Richard’s Almanacs. Writing is used to convey some sort of information, but what type of information varies immensely.  

So writing comes in all forms and for all different purposes, from entertaining to informing or even to persuade. Before one writes anything they should first think about why they are writing and who they are writing for. Writing must be tailor made to each situation for the most impact. Most of the writing that I will be doing will consist of informing others and persuading them to take action, usually to those who watch over whatever projects I will undertake.

For those of you who don’t know, Industrial Engineers are efficiency experts. It is our job to find a way to do things better. By “things”, I mean just about anything. For instance, we tend to do a lot of work in factories, helping them create their products faster, cheaper and with better quality. As you can probably guess, in order to integrate a large system to work in perfect harmony, there must be lots of communication between people to make sure stuff gets done right. That is where writing comes into play in my field.

There is far more writing in my major than most would expect. We write every single day without fail so we have to get pretty good at it. One of the most important things to get the hang of is knowing what format to write in. Or perhaps writing isn’t even the best method to go with. There are many other forms of communication to go with in order to get your information, I will go through a quick rundown of some of the most important modes of communication used for individuals in my major.

The Email. I’m sure that each and every one that is reading this has written an email or two at some point. In this day and age, being able to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world with a few keystrokes. You can make them as long or as short as you need to fit your needs. This is easily the most used form of communication used for people in the field. But it isn’t as simple as just sending a few words over the internet, you need to make sure that you are sending an effective email.

What do you get from this email? Nothing. Is this person serious, or are they being playful? The only real content is the single sentence “First I ran out of coffee, then my printer stopped working.” And not only that, you don’t get much from that, I mean, what am I supposed to do with that information? The other three sentences are basically repeating themselves, making them completely redundant. That being said, this email is in a good format for if you need to send a quick confirmation to someone. Though sometimes, in an informal situation where you send many individual emails to someone all of the format is lost and the entire email be a single email. Regardless of the length however, make sure that whatever you are making them read, is actually useful and gets all of the information needed across.

The next is a proposal, and no this is not the on one knee kind. A proposal is used when you are trying to convince someone that your new solution is the right one. As you would assume, a proposal proposes your idea and highlights the main benefits associated with it. This is as much a persuasive paper as you can get, because you need to get someone who has never heard about your plan to buy into it fully by the end. However with any good proposal is good backing and reasoning behind it, AKA you need fact to back up your claims. You not only want the reader to want to take part you want them to believe that this is simply the best way to do it.

How might you back up your claims? You would either look over someone’s research paper or write one yourself. I won’t go too in depth on this one because chances are good that somewhere in your high school career you had to write something like this. Research papers are usually as dry as they get unfortunately, so you won’t be reading many of these for fun, but they are loaded to the gills with information. You rarely need to worry about making them entertaining because the reader isn’t there for fun, they want to get down and dirty and get as much information out of it as possible.

There will be many times when after or during a project, some of your superiors or tem members will want to know what you are up to. This is where the technical paper comes into play. You want to get right to the point, because both of your time is valuable. The amount of technical jargon will vary depending on your audience of course, and can be moderately technical or filled with things that only veteran engineers would understand. In these writings, you explain to others what the heck is going on, so you can be held accountable and so others have the knowledge to help you. Very important to be able to let others know what is going on clearly and concisely, because if not you are just on your own, and having others there to help you can make all the difference between success and failure.

Another fairly common form that often takes the place of a technical paper or proposal is a presentation. Now there nothing new about presentations, just about every major has to do them in some fashion, and is a very common occurrence. However just because it very common doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do a great job. You want to have a maximum of three bullet points and 15 words. The least you can put on the slides the better. Try to have a picture on every slide, not only will it get their attention, it will also stick with them better than a few words on the screen. Confidence while presenting will let the audience know that you know what you are talking about and will take you more seriously as a result.

Communication doesn’t need to take the form of writing or pictures, because oddly enough, talking is a great way to communicate as well. People nowadays often forget that face to face communication is by far the best way to inform others. When hearing you talk, others notice the changes in your voice (not found in text) and can get more information out of that. Even better than that, if you are in the presence of the other individual, body language also comes into play. Being able to talk to others is the most important way to communicate. It will get rid of any confusion that may result from writing errors and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

As you can see, you can’t escape from writing in some form. I didn’t even touch on half of the different ways that Industrial Engineers write, and as you can see, there is plenty to go off of here. Communication is key for my major, and knowing what to write is the first step of getting your point across. Without proper communication, we have misunderstandings and inefficiencies. And of course, with misunderstandings and inefficiencies, nothing gets done.

Three Minute Thesis

Textual Analysis

Textual Analysis

The article that I will be analyzing is The Industrial Engineering Laboratory. This article talks about the learning techniques that are used at some of the top universities in the world. The laboratory focuses on having the students teach themselves and to limit the time in lectures and have more time in the fields. Giving students the proper instruction and learning community, they can learn more and retain more useful information.

Just a quick look at the article and one knows right away who this was written for, Industrial Engineers. First of all, this is a long and fairly in depth article. If you are not of a technical mindset then this seems like a very dry paper, and frankly it is a dry paper even if you are of a technical mind. Even as an industrial engineer, I needed to read over a few sections a second time due to not fully understanding it the first time through. A normal person would not have the patience or the desire to make it all the way through this article.

The purpose of this article seemed to be entirely upon conveying the new learning techniques that are being employed at the industrial engineering laboratory. There was very little fluff in this paper, it got to the point and it stayed there the whole time. This is to get as much information across I as few words as possible. A paper like this is great if you really wasn’t to learn some stuff and that the knowledge gain is more enjoyable than reading a fun little paper.

However the writer did add a few pieces to help those who might not the get the most out of reading a few hundred lines of pure information. There were a series of pictures that were used to illustrate the points that were made in the paper. These pictures were very simple and placed at such locations where after reading a section you could look at the picture and say, “Ah, I see how it all fits together now.” Another interesting tidbit about the images is that essentially, he used the same picture three times with different words attached to it. This meant that the pictures were to have each of the sections make sense and to help tie the entire paper together. Not only that but if you understood one part, it was very easy to make sense of the following parts.

That is not the only thing that causes me to think that this paper was not made solely for the top individuals in the academic world. The writer goes over some topic in depth that I got after the first sentence. There will be parts that all will understand with little to now effort on their part, so this can be read by most. However there is enough of the difficult stuff mixed in there that one can read a little deeper and get more out of it.

Clearly this academic article is meant for an industrial engineer interested about learning about new programs or someone that is simply interested in the academic world. It is simply chalk full of information to anyone that wants to take the time to decipher the more difficult sections. All in all a very informative paper that can teach you a lot about the innovative teaching methods for industrial engineers.

Visual Rhetorical Analysis

            When looking at visuals related to a given major you must first understand what that major is about. In my case that would be Industrial Engineering. We are more of the business side of engineering, and we also focus on efficiency. Because of this, one of our common jobs is to take complex engineering problems and turning it into the easiest form so that everyone (the administration) can understand it.

           

At first glance, one will notice that this is a very simple image. There is nothing too special about it. It is made to be as simple as possible so that anyone can make sense of it. It has a very simple color scheme and is in a web form, a form that all people learn at a young age. The creator of this image clearly wanted it to be easy to read and easy to understand.

Looking at the words inside of the outer bubbles we see that they used as few words as possible to convey the message, at most there are five words. Some of these words however are a bit higher level than many may know, for instance I know of many people who don’t know what ergonomics is. So those who would read this and get the most out of this are probably those who are somewhat technical minded. That being said, most individuals in a business that makes something could probably fully understand everything that is written.

As for the content of the bubbles, first glance probably isn’t enough for most. First of all, I doubt most would be able to guess what the middle bubble stands for, and the outer bubbles seem like a bunch of random things. ISE stands for Industrial and Systems Engineering. Once you know that, the rest starts to make a little bit more sense. Each of the branches in turn talks about the five main duties of an Industrial Engineer.

So this picture simply answers the question, “What does an Industrial Engineer do”? An IE can specialize in any one of these fields. Seeing as IE’s normally know what they are doing, chances are that this was meant for someone like you. Thanks to this little picture you understand all the basic duties of an Industrial Engineer.

Visual communication for Industrial Engineering

The creator of this graphic is simply trying to show people what industrial engineers actually do. It shows the five fields that IE's specialize. It is probably met for those that are unfamiliar with IE as it is a very simple design and the word used are not very technical at all. In fact, this is perhaps the simplest and least fancy design possible to get the information across, which is basically the basis of IE.

Summary Reflection

            Plain and simple, I didn’t really enjoy doing the summary. I realized that unfortunately most of the academic papers for my major (industrial engineering) are fairly dry. I also believe that industrial engineering papers are some of the more difficult due to the composition of these papers. For instance, when we write papers we are told to get as much information across with as little ink as possible, not much room for cutting away the fluff.

            However I see the benefit of being able to create a summary of an academic paper, or papers in general. Summarizing is basically just taking all of the important information of some big mess of writing. If we couldn’t get information from what we read then there would be no reason to read stuff. There is almost always a shorter and more efficient to get the important information out of a paper.      

            Another thing that that I have realized that I am on the right path for myself. My game plan is to get a bachelors in IE and then take part in the concurrent program to get a masters in some form of business management. The paper that I read was very interesting and I saw the merit all of their points, however I couldn’t imagine doing flat out IE work for the rest of my life. It was nice to be able to read about what the top IE masters programs are working on so I can get in better touch with my major.

Summary

The paper that I started reading was titled the industrial engineering laboratory. The paper focuses in on what industrial engineering is and new ways that it is being taught and utilized in the real world. The Industrial Engineering laboratory at TU Dortmund University in Germany has been working on new methods to get students ready for anything that the world can throw at them.

In order to start thinking about how to teach students about Industrial Engineering (IE) then you must first understand what it is that IEs do. “Industrial Engineers design, implement and improve value streams and socio-technical work systems with the aim to increase productivity and thus companies’ competitiveness on markets.”  Basically, IEs have to understand everything that is going on in a system so that if something goes wrong or if the system is needed to be made better, there is one individual who knows everything in the system to be able to fix the problems. That means that IEs must have a large knowledge base and the skills to break a large problem into small manageable parts.

That is where the Industrial Engineering Laboratory comes into play. The IE Laboratory is moving away from theoretical and lecture based teaching and moving towards more active, hands on and student centered courses. Students are given very basic lectures and then are given realistic problems that they must solve.

Each of the courses in this program must answer three fundamental questions: “What is the intended learning outcome for the IE students, how can an adequate learning environment for higher education in IE be designed, and how does and appropriate examination in this context look like?”

The intended learning outcomes can be broken down into four categories. Personal competence is and individuals ability to evaluate and criticize one’s own behavior and generating personal motivation. Activity competence is the ability to integrate knowledge, skills, attitude and the other competences in your actions. Social and communication competence is the ability to work out plans and communicate well in a group setting. Professional competence it the ability to solve problems in a professional working environment and being able to do so in a creative way. If a student cam come away with these competences then they will be able to succeed in business environments.

In order to properly teach these competencies, there must be a proper teaching environment however. The concept that many have turned to is called “Problem Based Learning (PBL)”. The focus of PBL is all about students solving realistic problems in a practical application. Students will work in self-managed teams on a specific problem to get it done well. The teacher does very little teaching and turns into more of a mentor, guiding the teams with feedback and some coaching if needed. Most of the responsibility for learning has fallen upon the shoulders of the students opposed to the teacher just talking to you.

One of the next questions that pops up is how do you test students in an environment where the students are not learning in the classical standard. If the goal is to teach students various competencies, then one must expect that that is what the students will be tested upon. The first method is through an oral text because the testing person and empathize the student’s thoughts and can examine their performance in an appropriate way. The second method is called the triple jump. With the triple jump, students must face a problem and determine learning objectives, find a way to reach those learning objectives based on the problem, and be able to present what they learned and how they solved the problem.

One such course in the IE laboratory is “Workplace Design”, where students must analyze and design a workplace to create the most efficient workplace. Students use all of their competencies to work together to fully understand the problems at hand and then discover the best ways to solve them. Keep in mind that this is a full class and that students are given an entire semester for this seemingly easy problem. Learning that there is always ways to improve and even if you work on the same thing for many months that there is still more that can be done.  

Industrial Engineering Laboratory is an integral part of an active, student centered and comprehensive-oriented education. Creating a realistic learning environment is making their graduates more prepared for what they will be doing for the rest of their careers. As with all systems, there is always room for improvement, but this school has taken one of the first steps in that direction.

Works Cited

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6201098&tag=1